On comics, from two different angles

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First, I think I might have actually found a way around the now-infamous elevator comic that has stalled Night Fugues for months.

Second, I spent a significant amount of time today harassing my fellow Information Architects about a Boxes and Arrows podcast that implied there was a difference between storyboards and comics, at least as far as the artifacts of the design process are concerned. Since I’m coming from the comic side of that dichotomy I thought it would be important to know the difference between a “design” comic and a “normal” comic, especially since I thought storyboards were comics. A storyboard is a piece of sequential art that expresses design and behavior of a system through a story that provides insight into the user’s mental/emotional state, which pretty much defines “comic” , so what the heck?

A conversation with my mentor led me to a conversation with another excellent IA, which led me to a printout of a presentation from this year’s IA Summit discussing how you could use a comic instead of a storyboard to present design ideas. That presentation was done by Kevin Cheng one of the creators of OK/Cancel, a design-oriented webcomic I’ve been reading for years, and it recommended the same books for writing comics to express design that I own in order to improve my comic production skills — Will Eisner and Scott McCloud and company.

So, having read the presentation and worked with storyboards for design (even though I’m not first-hand familiar with either one from start to finish) I’m willing to take the chance and summarize the difference between a storyboard and a comic when it comes to design.

Storyboards are comics by the definition of any comic author anywhere. But in storyboards, the panels generally concentrate on the screens and their functionality, business and user goals, and similar sawdust-flavored information.

A comic (as stated above) is is a piece of sequential art that expresses something through the act of telling a story. A comic (like any piece of fiction and some nonfiction) is generally showing the growth of the main character through their interaction with other characters, their environment, or themselves. A comic visually provides insight into the user’s mental/emotional state as well as that interaction with their surroundings.

A design comic (which is where we use the comic to express the design of a piece of software) keeps the same character focus that we find in standard comic strips and comic books. It uses sequential art to express high level design ideas (probably pre-wireframes) to add clarity to the growing user scenarios and situations, and share the user’s growth through the
story.

Or to sum up really quick and easy, storyboards are a) more likely to be higher fidelity detailed designs or wireframes, b) more likely to express business goals and user goals in the margins instead of in the comic, and c) really really boring to read.

*Updated 4/24 at 7:12 am when I not trying to type on the iPhone while falling asleep, and thus could correctly link and close tags.

And back we go….

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My kid sister (basschica) managed to bathe her Macbook in iced tea Friday. As a result, we’re back at the Apple Store today.

Let me just say that the Genius Bar and the way they handle it is the most awesome support mechanism I’ve ever seen. But the kid just got called up, so I’ll post more later.

We need more parents like this one.

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Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone.

When I was a kid, say, 8 or 9 years old, there were a rash of “I’ve got candy – get in my car” snatchings. Or at least that must’ve happened at some point. We didn’t have the constant media onslaught but everyone in all the schools were taught not to talk to strangers, not to take candy or puppies or anything else from strangers, and to run and tell an adult if something weird was going on.

Quite frankly, my friends and I (there were quite a few of us in this age group on my block) never got questioned or approached once by an adult who didn’t want to know which way to turn to get to the supermarket, or what the hell road they were on.

And if there was one piece of advice we were much more interested in, it was Avoid Stray Dogs. Because when you’re four foot tall and less than 100 lbs, a stray Laborador is freakin’ huge.

My folks did freak when I missed the bus and walked the five blocks home from the elementary school by myself, but we all lived through it. They freaked because I wasn’t on the bus, more than because I could get kidnapped. I think I was eight, or maybe nine. I had already been allowed to bike up to three blocks from my house — which had been the same house my father grew up in, and he’d biked to the next town over by his early teens.

Even once we moved to the sticks, I biked two miles in one direction or another to see friends, go to the grocery store, etc. and we didn’t have sidewalks (or in many cases shoulders on the road) or helmets or bike lights or anything.

My kid sister (to my knowledge) rarely if ever biked to a friend’s house and rarely if ever walked home from school. Yes, it was partially because we were in the middle of freaking nowhere, but it was also partially because you just don’t let your kids do that had already set in.

I applaud this mother for letting her kid learn and explore his world. He knows she trusts him (he probably also knows the consequences of betraying that trust) and he knows more about his own strengths than a whole lot of kids would otherwise.